He runs through the household, up the stairs, into his parent’s room. He shuts the door and attempts to lock it when he remembers that the door has always had a faulty lock and it won’t stay. He hurries into his mother’s big walk-in closet. After breathing heavily for a few seconds, he becomes quiet. Footsteps can be heard coming from outside the door. They are coming up the stairs and slowly get louder until they stop right outside the door, but not without a loud thump. They must have hit the door. The young man hiding in the closet waits anxiously for his pursuer to leave him alone. After all, he is pretty sure he wasn’t seen going into the room.

He is scared out of his mind, but still somewhat confident that the attacker will go away … He couldn’t be more wrong. The thumping on the door picks up again and become louder and more persistent. The door breaks open and the young man in the closet can hear it. He panics. He knows it’s only a matter of time before he is discovered and that the only way out of this situation is to fight. He looks franticly for a weapon. What he comes up with is one of his mother’s high-heel boots which he figures must be better than nothing. He remains quiet, waiting for his pursuer to approach the closet door, still holding on to a sliver of hope that he will not be found. The footsteps slowly get louder as the attacker gets closer to the closet. The young man counts the last few steps in his mind: One … Two … Three!

The man lunges into the door with his shoulder and breaks it down onto the attacker who is now lying on his back with the door on top of his body and the man on top of the door trying to hold him down. He gets a good look at the attacker who he is now sure is not a man, but a zombie. He takes his mother’s high-heel and smacks the zombie hard in the face with the soul. The zombie seems unfazed which leads the man to lift the heel over his head with the pointed heel in the back pointing downwards in the front and brings it down fast and hard as it bashes the zombie’s face in. It’s dead.

The man stands up a throws the now blood covered high-heel boot off to the side and he sits back on his mother’s and father’s king sized bed trying to calm down and figure out what is going on. He pushes the broken closet door off of the corpse and takes a closer look at it. It is exactly as he thought. The zombie is … or used to be one of his neighbor’s. He didn’t know his name and had never spoken to him, but he had seen him walking around the large apartment complex that the young man calls home. All of a sudden the young man hears a door downstairs open and a voice call his name. “Leon, we’re back! Mom wants you to come help us bring some stuff inside” It was the voice of Leon’s, the young man, sister, Ashley. Leon’s family, consisting of himself and his parents and sister, had gone camping for the weekend without him. Although, they wanted him to come, he never liked the outdoors very much and preferred to stay home. Now they were back and seemingly unaware that they could be in danger. While Leon is hoping that he just killed patient zero, he goes downstairs and outside to his mother’s minivan to help carry in their camping gear and make sure that were okay.

He makes his way downstairs at out the front door. At first, all that he sees is his family gathered around the minivan. His mom is getting out of the driver seat while his dad is opening the trunk and Ashley is making her way over to them both. He is relieved that they seem to be okay, but then he sees them: the horde of zombies approaching from almost a dozen yards away, seemingly running towards Leon, but before they get to him, they’ll get too his family. They’re in the way. He begins to run toward the minivan, his family still unaware of the enclosing horde. As he runs he notices an older man walking outside his house when he sees them too and the man immediately runs back inside and slams the door. As much as he hates it, the thought crosses Leon’s mind.

The horde hasn’t seen him yet, if he goes back now and stays quiet until they pass he could survive. He calmly turns around and makes his way back to his home and waits in the doorway contemplating if this is right or wrong – no, he knows it’s wrong. He’s contemplating whether to be brave or a coward, or is that stupid or smart? He waits in the doorway with the door halfway shut staring at his family. A zombie trying to run, although it’s really more like it’s haphazardly speed walking, approaches his father from behind and puts its dirty dead hands on his shoulders and takes a bite of flesh out of his father’s neck. He lets out a scream which catches not only his mother’s and sister’s attention, but the attention of all of the other zombies. Taking one last look at the oncoming chaos through the small space left open between the door and the wall, Leon has made his decision. He shuts the door.

Leon cannot sleep later that night as he lies awake in his bed staring up at the ceiling in his room with all of the lights off. He has always hated the sound of crickets chirping at night, but now he would give anything to hear that sound again. Anything not hear the incessant moaning of the undead all around him. He can hear them everywhere. It creates a very claustrophobic feeling. Although not looking particularly frightened, more of a lifeless and pensive look, he is really still extremely aware of how easily it could be for the dead to discover him. He cannot make a sound, which is why he lays there perfectly still on his bed with an aluminum baseball bat next to him just in case.
Leon was forced to stay inside for the next few days and although there wasn’t much food in the house for a whole family to live on for much more than that, it was plenty for one person to survive on for possibly over a week if rationed responsibly. He feels it is safe to make a quick run outside when there are only a few zombies left in the complex. He can see about ten zombies, but luckily they are spread out and only two of them are together. If he is careful he can sneak by them and make it to the minivan. He remembers that he received a call from his mom on their way back home. She mentioned stopping for groceries on the way back and she wanted to know if Leon wanted anything specific. All he has to do is make it to the minivan and back without alerting any zombies and he should have enough food to go for a couple of weeks if he is careful.

He makes it to the minivan a few minutes later after sneaking by most of the zombies and only having to take out two of them that spotted him. When he gets there the trunk is closed even though he clearly remembers his father opening it. He proceeds with more caution. He slowly opens the trunk and sees the groceries he needed along with one bag dropped by his dad on the ground, then he hears something coming from the backseat of the car. He closes the trunk and moves up to the backdoor and slowly opens it. What he finds is terrible. It’s his sister … zombified with a giant gaping wound in her arm surrounded by blood. Leon has seen enough zombie movies to know that she was bitten and then turned.

Ashley lunges toward Leon but before she can reach him, he slams the door in her face. Trying not to pay attention to the horror he just witnessed, he moves back to the trunk to get the groceries but he is stopped by the barrel of a rifle pointed at his face. It is held by an older man, about 50 years old, dressed in camouflage pants and an army green shirt with a shaved head. Leon remembers this man moving in a couple of months ago. The guy is ex-military and was the owner of the worst kept secret in the entire community that he had been stockpiling weapons. Some thought he was crazy … Leon just proved it. “I saw them groceries you had in the trunk … you got any more” the man asks Leon, keeping the rifle pointed at his face. Leon just stands there for a moment, still in shock from this whole predicament. Sure, I’ve got some groceries for you. He deviously thinks to himself. “In the back.” Leon says as he backs up until he is next to the front door. The man lowers the gun as Leon opens the back door. The man walks up to the back door to check inside when he is suddenly attacked by a zombified Ashley. He struggles to break free from her grip, but she pulls him into the minivan and bites into his neck. When he is halfway into the van, his legs dangling on the outside, Leon slams the door on the man’s legs four times until they are torn off of him, and he slams the door a fifth time to leave Ashley and the man inside the minivan.

Leon gets the groceries out of the trunk and brings them back inside. He needs to make another trip for the rest, but before he does he decides to find the old army guy’s house and get some of those weapons. It turns out the lived only two houses apart. The trip there and back was pretty uneventful aside from one zombie who spotted Leon, but was easily taken care of by his aluminum bat. He brought back two handguns, a sniper rifle, a fully-automatic assault rifle, and a shotgun. He also grabbed a machete and a bunch of ammo as well as some of the food that he had stockpiled over there. Leon had a feeling he would be returning to the man’s home for some more supplies in the future.

After bringing the guns back home and setting them all up he takes a look out of the window to check for more zombies before going back out to get the rest of the groceries. He sees two zombies by the backdoor of the minivan looking in through the back window. It takes Leon only seconds to realize that the zombies are his parents. Why are they looking in the window? It occurs to him that they are looking in at Ashley as if some part of their former selves were still inside of them somewhere. It’s sad really, and it makes Leon’s heart sink a little. Then he sees a man running toward the minivan. He is wearing black sweatpants with a grey hoodie and a black winter hat. He runs up to the minivan, pulls out a pistol and shoots the two zombified parents in their faces and they drop like ragdolls onto the pavement. The man then opens the trunk and grabs two bags of groceries and runs off. Leon is filled with a sudden rage.

He grabs his nearby sniper rifle and takes a shot at the man. It skims that man’s arm and causes him to stop and look at Leon. Through the sniper scope he can see a woman appear from behind a building and help the man over around the corner of the building. Leon can’t control himself. He gets up and grabs a shotgun and a handgun in a furious rage and storms off after the man. He is young and quick so he catches up to the man rather fast and takes shots at him with the handgun but to no avail. The man turns a corner and when Leon gets there he is gone. Then Leon realizes that he ran past a door. He had him now. Leon bashes the door open and aims the shotgun in front of him. What he sees would normally break someone’s heart, but not the now desensitized Leon who can feel only nothingness and anger. Huddled in the corner of the main room in the house is the man and the woman who helped him with two young kids about 6 years old in their arms. They’re a family and they look scarred. Leon looks around. The house looks empty. There is no food and no gun can be seen aside from the man’s pistol that he must have dropped on the ground while running. They have nothing … Or do they have it all? Leon thinks to himself. Leon has managed to survive as long as he has with plenty of food that would have run out much more quickly had his family stayed with him and he now had all of the weapons he needed and by trying to survive solo he could put himself at less risk and stay hidden more easily. But he was alone. He had let his family die. But now it seems like none of that mattered. The proof was in front of him: This family survived just as long as Leon and with less food and weapons, and apparently less luck. It then hit Leon … Why was he surviving? If Leon had killed this man, his family would be devastated, but if Leon died no survivors would ever know. The only other survivor he met was eaten by his sister. The end of Leon’s life would be insignificant. Leon lowers the shotgun and walks away.

He makes his way back to the minivan and kick his dead parents’ bodies out of the way before opening the backdoor and taking a few steps back. Ashley steps out of the minivan and walks towards Leon. Leon lifts up his arm and lets Ashley bite into it. I won’t live alone, but maybe we can die together. Leon thinks this to himself as he seals his fate forever. Later that night in an apartment similar in layout to Leon’s the man with the hoodie is running up the stairs while holding his crying wife’s hand. Tears can be seen in his eyes as well. He leads his wife into an upstairs bedroom but their hands are torn apart as the wife is grabbed from behind by a horde of zombies. She is savagely feasted upon. The man reluctantly slams the door shut and attempts to lock it. The lock is broken and won’t work. All of the man’s hope is lost as he falls back onto the bed behind him. He doesn’t know if he has the energy to go on. All of a sudden a zombie’s hand breaks through the door and the force of more and more zombies pushing up against it break it down. The man get one good look at the zombies leading the pack. He immediately recognizes the face of one of the zombies. It is the shooter from before, Leon. Next to Leon is Ashley. Shocked and tired, the man tries with all of his strength to push himself backward away from the zombies, but it’s hopeless. The zombified brother and sister lunge at the man and feast on his flesh. With some sliver of their former selves still inside of them, Leon thinks to himself as his body uncontrollably bites into and rips the man apart. This is my new family … I’m one of them.